Published: July 6, 2010

CHONGQING, China — On a sweltering morning last month, a white-haired guide trudged up a muddy path, leading a group of scholars toward a bamboo grove on the outskirts of this western Chinese city. The site, he said, was where a large portion of
China’s
imperial treasures were once hidden inside several big wooden sheds.

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Courtesy of Zhuang Ling

Members of the palace museum staff who helped move the artifacts to Chongqing. More Photos »

“They were stored right about here,” Hu Changjian, a local museum official, said of the artifacts, an unparalleled collection of more than a million objects from the Forbidden City in Beijing, including fine paintings, calligraphy, jade
and porcelain dating back centuries. He added, “We think they dug caves in the hills behind us to store some of the treasures.”

Photographers and documentary filmmakers traveling with the group of scholars recorded the scene, as the scholars, clutching notepads, scampered up a hill in search of caves.

The scholars, from mainland China and Taiwan,
were taking part in an extraordinary two-week research project, retracing the routes taken by the imperial treasures in the 1930s and 1940s, when they were being safeguarded from the ravages of civil war and Japanese
aggression, not to mention floods, bandits and warlords.

The original Palace Museum in Beijing was split in two — its staff as well as its collection — in 1949, when the Nationalist government fell to the Communists and retreated to the island of Taiwan with thousands of supporters and a huge
cargo of museum pieces.

For decades there has been debate about ownership of the divided treasures. But in recent years the two museums have begun to collaborate on exhibitions in a stunning show of cross-Strait cooperation. On the scholars’ journey this summer, the talk
was not of unification but of shared history and of a common desire to understand the remarkable events that both preserved the treasures and eventually led to their division.

“We had a rough idea of how things happened, but we didn’t know the details,” said Li Wenru, deputy director at the Palace Museum in Beijing. “But we knew it was a miracle that in wartime over a million treasures were moved
10,000 kilometers, on roads, in water, by air, and nothing was lost.”

The museum staff members who protected the artifacts on that 16-year odyssey, hiding them in bunkers, caves, temples, warehouses and even private homes, have all died. But some of their children were invited to participate in this year’s trip.

Zhuang Ling, 72, says his father, who had been a cataloger of the collection, was one of the staff members charged with guarding the imperial treasures. He recalls living and traveling with them as a child, in the mountains outside Chongqing.

“When the weather was good, they’d bring the paintings, calligraphy and books outside to give them some fresh air because it was too humid inside,” he said. “I could even see some of the landscape paintings.”

The collection was put together by emperors, mostly in the centuries between the Song dynasty (960-1276) and the brief reign of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor, at the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). After the Qing fell, the imperial family kept
the treasures. (In 1913 the family offered to sell them to the American industrialist and collector
J. P. Morgan for $4 million; Morgan died shortly after his staff received the telegrams.)

In 1924 the state expelled the imperial family from the Forbidden City, declared the collection national property and made it the foundation of a new Palace Museum.

But after Japan invaded north China in 1931 and threatened to move toward Beijing, the government, fearing the artifacts might be destroyed or carted off to Japan, shipped them, in more than 19,000 wooden crates, south to Nanjing, the new capital, in
early 1933. Then, just days before the Japanese destroyed Nanjing in 1937, they were divided into three groups and sent into hiding along three separate routes. Some of the most valuable objects ended up here in
Chongqing, the wartime capital.

Last month this humid, mountainous city was the seventh stop for the Chinese and Taiwanese scholars. They crowded into a rusted bank vault where some of the artifacts had been stored (it now houses sewing machines); visited the old central library, which
had exhibited some of the treasures during the war; and trekked up to a warehouse that had been deemed safe for the treasures, they were told, because it was adjacent to a Buddhist temple and so unlikely to be attacked
by Japanese forces.

Mr. Hu, the Chongqing guide, added new details to the record, even as he confessed to having discovered only three of the four storage rooms at the warehouse site. Minutes later Mr. Li, from the Beijing museum, followed a railroad track up a hill and
discovered what appeared to be the fourth warehouse space.

After Japan surrendered in 1945, the treasures returned to Nanjing. But the journey was not over. Civil war between the Nationalist government and the Communists, which had begun in the 1920s and abated during the Japanese occupation, resumed. In 1948,
with the Communists routing government forces in the north, Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalists, ordered the most valuable treasures shipped to Taiwan, along with much of the nation’s gold supply.

“The majority of the paintings from the imperial collection moved to Taiwan,” said Alfreda Murck, an authority on Chinese art at the Palace Museum in Beijing, though only about 20 percent of the collection made its way there. “They
chose very well,” she added.

Chiang’s decision divided more than just the collection. Liang Jinsheng, 62, said his father and grandfather helped protect the treasures in the 1930s and ’40s. But after the war, Mr. Liang’s brother and grandfather accompanied some
of the treasures to Taiwan while Mr. Liang’s father stayed behind in China, following another part of the collection back to Beijing.

“This trip made me realize how much my parents’ generation did,” said Mr. Liang, who catalogs artifacts at the Beijing museum and is a fifth-generation staff member there.

In Taiwan the treasures were stored in a cave for years, out of fear that the Communists might invade or bomb the island; only in 1965 did the National Palace Museum of Taipei open. In Beijing, meanwhile, the Palace Museum had few visitors in the 1950s
and ’60s. But the treasures had enormous symbolic value in both places.

David Shambaugh, who with Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott wrote “The Odyssey of China’s Imperial Art Treasures,” said Chinese leaders had long viewed them as a means of validating their power, even under Communism. During the Cultural
Revolution, when Red Guards tried to destroy anything associated with tradition, Mao ordered the museum protected.

“Every successive regime used the collection to legitimize themselves with elites,” said Professor Shambaugh, a China scholar at George Washington University. “Mao and the Communists saw themselves as the inheritors of 5,000 years of history.”

There has been no dialogue between the two museums about whether the treasures should be unified in one location, officials of both institutions say. And in Chongqing and elsewhere on the trip, the subject of ownership was carefully avoided. “There’s
only one” palace museum, said Mr. Li of the Beijing museum, in that “the two are one.”

And Chu Huiliang of Taipei said, “Both sides don’t talk about this issue because we’re not the ones who can resolve it.”

The museum officials insisted that it wasn’t important where the treasures were kept, only that they were preserved. The two museums are teaming up for a joint exhibition in Beijing later this year, about their travels following the route of the
imperial treasures. And in July 2011 they plan to hold a joint exhibition in Taipei, joining two parts of an ancient painting from the Yuan dynasty that was divided when the Nationalists fled.

Still, for the moment, the Taipei museum has no plans to send any of its objects to Beijing, and is unlikely to do so until the Beijing government formally agrees that it will not seize artifacts lent by Taiwan. As hopeful as the new cooperation is, museum
officials on both sides acknowledge, it has its limits — at least for now.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 7, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.